#that parodies the isekai genre

[conspirartist]

Revisiting the character designs I did for my barchelor thesis (part 1/3). The older version is bellow the cut. I tried to stay as close as possible to the original designs, as I still think they work very well...

Anyway, meet Peter, a silver-tongued ghost punished to work as a bartender in his after-life.

[professor-doc-emeritus]

finished reading the konosuba light novels today, I think if i have any takeaway form this series it's that even very simple characters can land super well if you use them right. It managed to be entertaining and engrossing the whole way through, even though you can sum up the entirety of each main character in 1 sentence. I know everyone has a different tolerance for humor, and I'm certain for a lot of people the core jokes got old fast, but for me it managed to stay amusing and compelling throughout. Just throwing the main characters against different fantasy scenarios always managed to make the humor hit. It even left me wanting more, which is impressive considering it's a 17 volume series. Fingers crossed the author gets around to that sequel series he teased a few years back

[specterthief]

CORRECT this is what this post was about actually

my #1 elitist opinion is that if you are creating something that presents itself as a parody or subversion of a specific genre you should be thoroughly familiar with genuine examples of that genre

[mahou-furbies]

The more recent magical girl titles have made me think about the trends in the genre. Or more specifically in the henshin heroine/magical girl warrior sub-genre.

This is what the magical girl genre as I see it is built upon, stories aimed at girls where the heroines transform into a cute outfit and fight monsters. And if a character in a non-mg work is a fan of an in-universe magical girl show, this is usually what is referenced (rather than the cute witch or magical idol type). Lately there has been very few new IPs like these aimed at a younger audience; a ton of older hits are getting some kind of reboots or sequels, but outside Precure there aren't that many new titles. And the Precure seasons of course are a part of the franchise instead of something totally new.

When Madoka came along it caused a wave of other darker magical girl titles, with their premise being some variation of "what if the stories from the previous group were edgy?". And, contrary to what detractors say, they mostly have something new to offer and aren't just Madoka clones, though I think it's obvious that Madoka's success is what led to the creation of so many of them.

I feel that the golden age of the edgy magical girls has also passed, and now the new works like these are generally a part of an existing franchise (namely Madoka), and the new magical girl shows aimed at an older audience tend to be parody types, like MahoAko, Magical Girl Destroyers or Machikado Mazoku. Or the parodies have been there all along, but nowadays they're more prominent when there's not many of the more straightforward stories around. In general otaku media experiments with genre elements a lot (seriously look at all the isekai premises for example), so these genre-aware works are par for the course.

What feels fresh is the increasing amount of magical girl titles aimed at a younger/non-otaku audience that are more genre aware and have characters who know what a magical girl is and have expectations on what they should be like, or at least expect the audience to. Here we have MahoAku (a fluffy comedy of how the magical girl and the evil officer are in love), Magilumiere (magical girl is a regular job for adults in this universe), Acro Trip (the main character is a normie and a magical girl fan) or Mahou Shoujo Dandelion, which inspired this post in the first place (a manga where one of the monsters is friends (family?) with the magical girl).

Here's to hoping for more popularity for these! While I would very much like for more new magical girl stories with a more straightforward premise, I also welcome any variety with open arms. Especially when Precure as pretty much the only other player in the game of non-reboot non-otaku magical girl anime IPs is so categorically opposed to doing anything new with its story.

[writingwithcolor]

Any advice for handling race in reincarnation situations?

@swamp-spirit asked:

I'm writing a story that includes characters being reincarnated with completely different appearances. It's a fantasy world, and most of the characters are being reborn in the same region, but I still want a range of skin tones and features in the main cast (this is a comic). I have weird feelings about a character being 'reborn' with notably lighter or darker skin, but it also feels implausible and lazy for people to Just Happen to have a similar appearance when the theology of the story doesn't support it. Characters being reborn, and taking out things specific to real life groups, what are the major things you'd want an author to read up on or take into account? (Note: there is not a 'white' looking ethnic group in this story)

I don’t think it’s a problem as long as the skin tones don’t have any correlation to the circumstances that they’re reincarnated into.

- SK

It’s an interesting question, because in most religions where reincarnation/ transmigration of the soul is a feature of “what happens after death”, remembering one’s past life is not really part of the package deal. From what you’ve written, it’s not clear to me where the “memory” of these characters’ lives are held. Is there a 3rd person omniscient narrator telling the audience who each person is in their next life or do the characters themselves retain memory of past lives?

Assuming this is your typical reincarnation scenario where characters retain no memory of previous lives, it doesn’t much matter. The next life is the next life. Who a person was in their previous life and that identity, in theory, means nothing to them. This also means whatever personality, values, experiences and so on they had in their previous life no longer has meaning. They are, in effect, another person. However, you say you feel awkward about the above which makes me wonder if characters are remembering past lives, in which case…

If you study pretty much any major Asian religion where reincarnation is a part of the belief system, having no memory of the previous life is par for the course. In present-day religions like Jainism, Sikhism, Hinduism and Buddhism, only “special” (I’m using the term very casually here) entities like bodhisattvas, guru, arihant, buddhas, etc. usually get to keep their memories, while the rest of us (literal) mere mortals are supposed to lose our memories between lives as a part of Samsara. In Hinduism, even the gods often forget their previous lives, unless their reincarnation had a targeted purpose (Like being born to defeat an evil entity). 

For most people, it is only through prayer, devotion, meditation and accumulated virtuous/ good/ compassionate deeds that humans are thought to deepen their understanding of the nature of the universe, and thus have the capacity to remember past lives (I’m, again, paraphrasing very loosely here from several years worth of university history+religion courses).  

This is why the isekai genre in Japan is largely regarded as a “cheat”/ parody genre of fantasy. The protagonist, according to common Japanese cultural beliefs, which are quite heavily grounded in Buddhism, is definitively “cheating.” Not to get too ironically biblical, the character’s success often comes from the forbidden knowledge borne of their previous life. 

Thus, there are two ways I look at your characters’ predicaments: 

It’s not technically reincarnation - not by the way most major world religions define reincarnation, anyway. You have people who died now inhabiting other bodies, but that’s not the same as the transmigration of the soul. Also, you want to delve into the weirdness (and maybe heaviness) of “Wow, I went to sleep with one face and woke up with another.” There are certainly stories about people who have had dramatic cosmetic plastic surgery, weight loss surgery, HRT, etc. and then experienced the difference in the “before” versus “after” of how their altered physical appearance makes them feel, as well as how other people treat them. Even if the community your characters are born into now differs from their previous community (Which I guess would make this more a “I traveled between dimensions, and my appearance altered in the process” sci-fi adjacent affair), their new life will still have social environments with differing attitudes towards human physical appearance that will affect your characters’ emotional states. 

Isekai it up and play with the ridiculous contradiction of having past lives and differing memories of one’s appearance. Isekai manga, manhwa and webtoons all make use of this trope heavily, especially with protagonists who experience a “glow-up” (Ex. Going from a Plain Jane OL to beautiful fantasy heroine) or, by contrast, protagonists who end up in very different forms from their original lives (Tensura, I’m a Spider, So What?). I’d be creative and go even more granular. Being able to tan after a lifetime of getting sunburns or no longer needing glasses might be nice, but what if the new body lacks the enzymes to process dairy or alcohol? What about dealing with differences in hair texture? Skincare routines? What about living life as a very tall person after being quite short or vice versa? What if you bumped into an acquaintance from your previous life, and one of you clearly got a more “coveted” reincarnation?  See how far of an extreme you can take this idea until it feels too uncomfortable or ridiculous. 

Marika.

[sleep-drunk-kitten]

𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐯𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐚 𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐬𝐲 𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐥 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐝𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐞𝐬 | 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐮𝐝𝐞

pairing: enhypen x fem!reader

genre: crack, fluff, isekai!au, royalty!au

content warnings: slight allusion to suicidal thoughts, swearing, reader is anxious about the possibility of being killed

summary: after dying in a freak accident involving a suspiciously familiar white and blue truck, y/n wakes to find herself in the body of a petty side villain from a romance fantasy novel, doomed to die at the hands of her own fiance.

notes: I'm terrible at summaries but the girlies who get it get it!! This short series is going to be a very lighthearted parody of your typical romance isekai manhwa🤭with all the usual shenanigans and tropes that typically follow! I hope you all enjoy~

I will be making a taglist for this fic, so if you're interested in being added please either drop an ask or let me know in the comments

Everything after the cut IS proofread for once, but please feel free to let me know if any typos slipped through the cracks!

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  “Let's go over this one more time,” you say, pacing back and forth, shivering as your feet press into cold marble.

  “You said that five rehashes ago babe,” your best friend whines, head lolling over the side of your bed, “I think we get the plot, a bunch of Very Hot men all want you dead because you're sexy and you don't get along with their needy pick me girlfriend.”

  “That- well I mean yeah,” you sigh, pinching the bridge of your nose, “but that's not the point, Sun, the point is that we need to figure out how to make sure I, y'know, don't fucking die?!” 

  Sunoo groans, his silky black pyjamas blending into your tangled sheets so they cascade around him in an inky puddle when he slides closer to the floor. “The Princess was a bitch, a mean grumpy little thot, just don't be a hoe, avoid the Hot Men, and you should be fine- yah! What's with the face!-”

  Expression pressed somewhere between exasperation and disgust, you shake your head at him. 

  “You've clearly never read an isekai manhwa, you can’t just run away from the plot, it holds onto you like a clingy stalker ex… sometimes as a clingy stalker ex.”

  “So? Just… stick with plan Don’t Be A Thot?” he pauses for a moment before a shit eating grin spreads across his face, and you preemptively snag a pillow off the loveseat beside you. “It'll be hard to pretend to be something you're not but I'm sure you can do it!” 

  And there it is. 

  With well-practised precision, the embroidered cushion lands squarely in his face. 

  “This is my life on the line here Kim Sunoo! Could you take it seriously for just two seconds?”

  Against your will, your eyes begin to sting with tears, limbs already growing restless in the few moments you've been standing still, fatigue and fear battling under your skin. 

  You hadn't slept peacefully in over three weeks. Your mind refusing to shut down of its own volition since you'd woken up in the room you now paced in, in the body you now paced in. 

  For the first four days, you were insane. 

  Screaming and pleading with a man who claimed to be your father, confused by the sorrow in his eyes and the tenderness in his hands as he prevented you from leaving your room.

  Babbling through tears to the maids who filtered in and out, telling them that the title they were calling you by was not your own.

  Curled into a corner of a closet, trying and failing to steady your breathing as you slowly came to terms with the fact that this was really happening. 

  You'd been truck-kun-ed clean out of the life you'd known. 

  Despair followed. 

  Hopeless, hollow grief when you realised what your name in this particular world might mean. 

  Princess y/n l/n. 

  Spoiled and arrogant daughter of the Duke.

  A side villain of little significance set to die for the sake of the female lead. 

  Set to die.

  You'd laughed when it hit you. The one thing you'd wanted more than anything in your previous life was being handed to you on a silver platter. How fortuitous. 

  It wasn’t until the eighth day, when you'd resigned yourself to your fate, that Sunoo came crashing through the large oak doors that were usually locked to keep you in, raised voices and a stamped of footsteps following behind him. 

  “SHE'S MY FRIEND I CAN SEE HER WHENEVER THE HELL I WANT,” he’d shouted. 

  Slamming your doors shut as he turned to face you. 

  He was the one who'd been running, face flushed, chest rising and falling rapidly. But it felt like you were the one catching your breath, heart pounding in your ears. 

  “Sunoo?...” his name was barely a whisper on your lips.

  “(y/n),” relief flooded his features, “you're here.”

  He stumbled towards you, pulling you into his chest, body shaking as he held you so tight you could barely breathe. 

  “You're here you're here you're here-” he babbled, tears soaking through your clothes. 

  It took a long time to console him, and longer still for you to believe that he was there, puffy face squished between your shaking hands. 

  You remembered he'd been walking with you when the accident happened, his smiling face frozen in time when the headlights rushed closer. But you'd thought he survived. You didn't imagine for a second that he'd somehow landed in the same world as you. 

  That he'd be just as annoying in this world as he was in the last.

  “Okay okay, I'm sorry,” he says in the present, standing and dragging your blankets with him, “I was trying to lighten things up, you've been stressing about this too much, I’m worried.”

  And when he waddles next to you and wraps you in a hug, you know you wouldn't trade his annoying ass for anything. Sunoo was the reason you were trying to find a way to survive this in the first place. Without him, you knew you would've probably gone with the flow of the story, allowing the gallows to take you. 

  “I'm not stressing.”

  “Sweetie, you have a whole conspiracy theory board pinned into what I think is a very valuable painting of your grandfather.”

  “Touchè.”

  You both turn to look at said board, a mess of string and poorly sketched portraits pinned to a painting of a grumpy looking old man on a white horse. “Remind me again who's who, I think I have the gay prince mixed up with the emo soldier boy.”

  You smile, rolling your eyes, knowing full well he has no trouble remembering the character’s you’d told him about at least a dozen times. 

  “This one,” you say, pointing to an angular stick figure with a crown surrounded by sparkles, “is the crown prince who I'm engaged to because of fuckin’ course.”

  Sunoo nods, “Of fuckin’ course.”

  “The buff one is the knight I hire to kidnap the female lead when I think his royal highness has a thing for her, except knightey over here has a conscience and thinks the female lead is too pure and sweet to kidnap or whatever and ends up vowing to protect her or something.”

  “You'd think someone with a conscience would have the decency to do a job if they had the audacity to take money for it, I mean he had no issue kidnapping a chick before he had the hots for her, that's kinda gross.”

  “When you put it like that… anyway, the last two are a priest who wants her for her divine powers blah blah blah and the crown prince's illegitimate little brother.”

  “His brother?” 

  “Yeaaa…”

  “There’s other fish in the sea my man…” he says, giving the second crowned stick figure a sympathetic little pat. “So of the lot, who's the biggest threat?”

  “My fiance…”

  “No matter what we decide to do, you gotta dump the guy right?”

  “Yes,” you say, confidence creeping into your voice. “There are a lot of variables, I've read enough of these things to know that 90% of the time they get kinda weird about their fiances when they dump them, but it's gotta be done.” 

  “Then we start there, the rest of this nonsense can't be figured out till it happens.”

  He waves a hand at the other coloured threads linking squares of paper with possible outcomes and scenarios scribbled over them.

  “That's true…” you breathe, brows furrowed, eyes darting across the board.

  Sunoo’s lips curl into a slight pout when he sees you slipping back into the agitated state he’d been trying to coax you out of for the past fortnight. If he were being completely honest with you, he doesn’t believe in all this isekai nonsense, sure that if you simply avoid the plot you could easily live out your lives as a wealthy nobles without much trouble, but he knows that there isn’t much point in arguing with you. No, the best way to look out for you would be to support you as he’d always done, to have your back in this world the same way he had in the last, even if he thought you were being ridiculous.  

With a sigh, Sunoo presses a thumb into the crease between your eyes, distracting you from the painting of your grandfather, holding back a smile at the way your nose scrunches in annoyance.

  “Stop worrying,” he says, smoothing over the spot a few times before planting a kiss on your forehead, “whatever happens, we'll handle it together, okay?”

  “...Okay,” you breathe, resting your forehead on his shoulder.

  He presses a kiss to the top of your head, arms encircling your waist, the warm pressure of his presence surrounding you comforting. The one constant that had followed you into this life. “Plus, we’re early, aren’t we? The plot of your novel doesn’t start for…”

  “Another year,” you sigh, “It all starts in their second year at the royal academy, when the female lead shows up as a transfer from the land they were at war with till a while ago… a show of peace or something once it’s all over.” 

  “We have time… you’ll be just fine babe, he says. “Plus, you keep worrying about them killing you, but don't they always end up falling in love with the dimension yeeted villainess in those comics?”

  You scoff, pulling away. “I highly doubt that's possible Sunoo, I'm not the main villainess, I'm just a random side character.”

  “A gorgeous, quick witted, adorable little random side character with an amazing sense of humour and such a big brain that she chooses to use for the dumbest things-”

  “Sunoo!” you laugh, plucking another cushion off your couch to throw at him. 

  There was absolutely no way.

  …

  Right?

[sixth-light]

Slowly getting through book reviews...for September I can recommend The Waiting Game by Nicola Clark (a genuinely fresh-feeling history of the court of Henry VIII that follows various ladies-in-waiting through those turbulent years) and How To Be A Dark Lord And Die Trying by Django Wexler, a funny, filthy (complimentary), entertaining parody of both time loops and portal fantasy/isekai fiction that understands all the tropes of both genres and loves them as much as it interrogates them.

[starfieldcanvas]

You seem like the appropriate person to ask, so might as well. How do I read Scum Villain's Self Saving System? I'm an english only reader that's not very familiar with the danmei ecosystem.

It's been published in English! Big bookstores like Barnes & Noble are carrying Seven Seas danmei these days. My local indie carries them as well. And of course you can buy them on Bookshop or your preferred online retailer. There are four volumes in the English printing, which comprise the original chapters, a lot of illustrations, some translator notes on the basics of cultivation novels and Chinese forms of address, and the "extras", bonus chapters that are a fairly common addition to books that were originally published as pay-per-chapter webnovels.

My local library system has at least one copy of every volume. I do live in a large city (with a large Asian population to boot), but I don't know how relevant that is. The series was an NYT bestseller, so it's totally plausible that even a medium-size county system would have them too. And if you're very patient, you can always request the series be added to your local library catalog.

But the obvious easy answer is that the whole thing is (shh!) still online. 'Lily's BC translation' made it through the whole thing, and there are other slightly smoother fan translations that you can start off with before switching translations when you run out of chapters.

The issue with reading it online is that you're going to run into some odd mixes of preservation vs translation vs localization ('Shidi' sounds much nicer than 'Junior Apprentice-Brother', imo. but why is it always Regret of Chunshan and never Regret of Spring Mountain?) and some transplanted Mandarin dialogue formatting (often it's just [Charactername, "Dialogue"] with no dialogue tag at all) that will take a little getting used to. The translator notes are a lot more colorful, though!

Scum Villain is a fun trip to read knowing pretty much nothing going into it. It's a convergence (and parody) of four different genres: stallion novel, danmei, isekai/transmigration, and cultivation/xianxia. Stop here if you want to go in genre-blind!

Here are my random thoughts about what might be nice for new readers to know IF they don't feel like dropping themselves in the deep end and learning by osmosis:

Stallion novels:

This is the type of webnovel being parodied by Scum Villain's book-within-a-book Proud Immortal Demon Way. Kinda like a harem anime, but more focused on providing a satisfying male power fantasy. Though you can definitely get the gist of it just from the exposition in Scum Villain, there were a few misconceptions I walked away with at the end of the book. This rundown on AO3, Stallion Novels: A Guide, is a brief introduction to the genre and how it differs from or overlaps with other genres of Chinese webnovel.

Danmei:

The popular danmei that have made it the furthest into Western circulation don't necessarily give a representative sampling of common-denominator danmei tropes, precisely because the popular stuff is usually the memorable standouts rather than the generic pulp. So just keep in mind that the common gong (seme) archetype is the dangerous, demanding, quasi-rapist huge-dicked dom who magically makes dry pounding feel insanely pleasurable, and the shou (uke) archetype is the delicate virginal younger man who says no but means yes and cries prettily during sex. These traits WILL be thrown in a blender and parodied, lovingly.

Isekai/transmigration:

This is the trope where you die in real life and wake up in a fantasy world (typical isekai) or in an explicitly fictional setting you recognize from your real-world media consumption (fairly typical transmigration.) Especially in the Chinese webnovel side of the genre, there's often a lot of emphasis on 'leveling up', point farming, and getting 'achievements' like in a video game. Access to this game system typically gives the player advantages over the natural inhabitants of the new world. If there isn't a game system, the player usually still has some kind of magical specialness conferred by being from 'the real world', such as knowledge of how the plot will go. These things will, again, be parodied all to hell.

Cultivation/xianxia:

It's apparently pretty common for westerners ignorant of Daoism and new to xianxia ("immortal heroes") stories to assume cultivation stuff is unique to whatever cultivation-setting book they happened to pick up first. If you had never heard of vampires and then you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, you'd be forgiven for initially assuming that the show invented vampires, but you'd misunderstand its commentary on existing vampire lore, and it would probably be confusing how much vampire stuff it inexplicably expected you to already know. With that in mind, you can see why it might be helpful to have a vague awareness of what "cultivation" refers to in xianxia novels.

Here's my stab at it: "cultivation" means something like "increasing one's spiritual energy reserves and improving one's control over spiritual energy (qi) through meditation, study, and physical discipline, in order to develop a powerful core of spiritual energy that can heal wounds, enable powerful martial techniques, slow visible aging or stop aging entirely, and allow a person to forgo food and sleep indefinitely as they transcend the limitations of their physical body and become immortal, maybe even ascending to godhood."

Usually cultivators practice cultivation in cultivation sects - these sects are typically depicted as a cross between a temple, a boot camp, a university campus, and a small independent political entity

Everyone in the same sect ("martial family") refers to each other using sect-flavored family terms. Two people of the same generation are sect-siblings and will use sibling suffixes with the "shi-" prefix to indicate it's a sect relationship. Your sect mentor is your shizun/shifu ("honored teacher-mentor-master"/"teacher-mentor-master"). Someone in your mentor's generation is your sect-uncle or sect-aunt; they'll refer to you as their sect-niece or sect-nephew.

Similar to how Chinese family name suffixes differ by age order, sect-family suffixes differ depending on seniority (i.e. when your master took you as a disciple, relative to the other disciples.) But different novels play with these seniority rules differently and may assign suffixes by age alone or by some other ranking system.

Westerners occasionally get freaked out when people in the same sect generation fall in love because the characters are sect siblings. But there's no incest implied at all—it's nothing more than two people being in the same boarding school or church congregation.

If a cultivator is not in a sect, they're called a rogue cultivator ; this confers less stability and political prestige, but despite the name, rogue cultivators are not outlaws or apostates. It just means "independent."

Cultivators will often accept requests from civilians to deal with marauding monsters and mysterious ghost-related deaths. How much money they expect for their services is generally tied to how righteous they are.

Depending on their chosen cultivation path, they may be more martial or less martial. Cultivators of the sword path use spiritual swords that can (1) work like a regular sword but better, (2) project power at range in a glowing beam called a sword glare, or (3) be directed remotely in battle using hand seals (adopted into Daoism from Buddhism, known elsewhere as mudras) or wordless telepathy. Some cultivators of the sword path will nevertheless have non-sword spiritual weapons or favor other qi-powered martial techniques.

Cultivators make use of talismans (spells written in red cinnabar ink on strips of paper and then activated, often used like throwable magic stickers) and arrays (more powerful, longer-lasting spells painted or carved into locations or objects.)

Various stages of core formation may be referenced to indicate power levels. Reaching a new stage may involve some kind of tribulation, health risk, or grueling purification process (e.g. expelling all your body's impurities out through your pores as black goo.)

Spiritual energy is channelled through pathways in your body called spirit veins to key points called meridians. Different people may be said to have different types of spirit veins typed according to the five elements. A trained cultivator can examine someone's meridians to check their spiritual health or cultivation aptitude.

Strain on your psyche or your spiritual energy can lead to what's called a qi deviation, where the spiritual energy circulating through you gets fucked up and you have the spiritual equivalent of a stroke. Sufferers may bleed from all their face holes, lash out mindlessly at anyone who comes near them, hallucinate, straight-up die, or endure wacky shenanigans like temporarily reverting to childhood.

Cultivators may use external alchemy to create power-boosting pills in small alchemical cauldrons.

Dual cultivation is exchanging energy through sex in order to aid in spiritual regulation or to mutually increase power levels. It can be done in a one-sided way to steal spiritual energy, which is known as making a human cauldron. In the real religious practice on which the fantasy version is based, dual cultivation relies on the exchange of men's yang and women's yin, but somehow in danmei xianxia the m/m couples seem to manage it just fine...

Different Chinese novels and shows do different variations on cultivation (the same way Western shows do variations on vampires/angels/demons/etc) but they're all ultimately drawing on the same Daoist tradition of internal alchemy (also called The Way of the Golden Elixir) with bits of Buddhism and Chinese folk religion mixed in. (Chinese folk religion is usually where the monster/ghost/demon stuff comes from.)

Other stuff:

Scum Villain is peppered with a bunch of trope references that will be largely unfamiliar to most western readers, like "white lotus"/"black lotus", "blackened", "black belly", and so on. It also borrows a few Japanese archetype references here and there. "Cannon fodder" is fairly self-explanatory at least.

It's fun to look these up, but it's equally fun to just figure them out from context.

Hope this helps! Enjoy your reading!

[lwoorl]

So I might be bringing everything to Cervantes vs Vega cause I’m currently working an article regarding their relationship, but a thing not many people know is that they knew each other and, while they started as good friends, by the end of their careers they HATED. THEIR. GUTS.

(Well, we don’t know how much of it was, like, legit hate, but we still got lots of scathing correspondence of them just insulting each other and their writing to hell and back, so critics maintain the “Young friends to bitter rivals” narrative, and that’s what we’ll keep for this comparison)

Just look at this shit Lope wrote when Cervantes was just about to publish his book: “De poetas, muchos están en ciernes para el año que viene; pero ninguno hay tan malo como Cervantes ni tan necio que alabe a Don Quijote” (Of poets, many are in the making for the coming year; but there is none so bad as Cervantes nor so foolish that he praises Don Quijote)

Lope even sent a letter in which he called things like pig and ass which I’m not adding here cause it’s rather long, but you can look it up. Anyway, my point is, Lope was a fucking antifan.

And Cervantes, in the prologue of the Don Quijote also attacked him back! When he writes "están otros libros, tan llenos de sentencias de Aristóteles, de Platón y de toda la caterva de filósofos..." (There are other books, so full of sentences by Aristotle, Plato and the whole bunch of philosophers...) He’s alluding to Vega! Saying “He’s so fucking pretentious, my god he’s so pretentious, so full of shit, at least my book isn’t this pretentious)

There are even people who believe Lope wrote the Quijote de Avellaneda as a Fuck You to Cervantes (The unofficial continuation to Don Quijote that eventually inspired Cervantes to publish the real, actual second part of the story in grand part as a “No! Fuck YOU!”) so like, you see where I’m coming from on the comparison, right? They’re antifans and one of them writes a continuation to the story to spite the other???

Now, if we try to assign SQH and SQQ roles I think that’s where the comparison breaks a little. SQH is closer to Lope, yes, since he was very prolific and… uh… kind of a sellout if we’re honest (watch me get killed by the literary critics. Look I love his work as much as anyone But You Know I’M Right!!!). Plus, he played into the topics that were popular at the time (transcendental love, God, etc). Meanwhile, Cervantes, while also very prolific (In fact he was a “Try everything at least once!” kind of guy, at least when it comes to poetry) wrote on less popular topics (The life of the common man, for example) and his style is harder to define, being characterized by his wit and humor, which reminds me of svsss vs pidw, a little, I guess. With pidw being the usual “popular, more serious book” (in its respective genre) and svsss being a parody and a comedy.

But also, Lope is the antifan in this case (well they both are antifans of each other, but my god, read the letters, Lope is the absolutely the biggest antifan in my eyes) and the one rumored with writing an apocryphal continuation, but also also there’s the fact Cervantes eventually wrote The Amazing Don Quijote 2: The revenge on Avellana so like, yes, the comparison breaks at this point. It was very thin to begin with, but I still feel like I’m onto something, I’m onto something right here, yeah, you just wait

Oh you know what book Scum Villain is actually very much like?

Don Quixote.

Goofy-ass comedic narrative-about-narratives that can be summarized as 'a lot of unnecessarily stupid things happen to a man with just so much genre-poisoned misunderstanding of everything, including himself.'

Yes Don Quixote went on to be enshrined as one of the foundational texts of Western Literature, and has been interpreted by Great Minds as being About an incredible range of really deep political and identity things, some of which may even have been correct.

But also just. We've got a protagonist guy whose identity has become lost inside a Lord Somebody as a consequence of reading wayyyyyy too much pseudohistorical schlock. A guy who inspires simultaneous responses of 'look at this clown' and 'omg he's me irl.'

Satirical genre pastiche relying on the collision of the modern banal and the imaginary elevated past for both bathos and social commentary, and the conflict between literary convention and real human psychology for narrative and even some pathos. The incredible embarrassment around the entire wildly inappropriate romance. Don Quixote was always first and foremost a comedy about fan behavior.

It's the same Kind of a novel.

[str8aura-no-not-that-one]

finally reading Beware of Chicken and going through the very interesting experience of reading a satire of a genre i have no foreknowledge of. I'm picking up on the parts that are meant to be parody, and understanding in some semblance the original tropes, but the majority of the elements meant to be taken at face value by readers are completely lost on me.

Helping the process along somewhat is the fact that Jin Rou clearly shares DNA with a classic HiE/isekai fic anon; good-natured but immature, obsessed with Earth pop-culture and looking for a good time and entertainment over power or status. These recognizable elements make the book a lot more palatable than it might have been had it a more serious protagonist, or one equally ingrained in satire of Xianxia archetypes.

[st-just]

🔥generic seasonal isekai.

Literally do not get the appeal at all. Like I can't even be really mean here because I can't stand sitting through one of them long enough to make any good jokes. The whole genre feels like self-parody of shameless wish-fulfillment adventure stories.

[mnkiss]

A quick list of animes I watched and don't want to forget 3:

Satsuriku no Tenshi - perfect for halloween, it was a short story with an easy to forget plot and characters I could root for. Tbh it hooked me with the never ending suspense and Zack. And I'll never forget the heartbreak at the end. So toxic and broken and tragic. The horror elements were fun, sometimes scary even so 7/10! Demon slayer - Its a bingeable shounen. The story is mid, the animation is cool, the MC is kind and likeable + i love how they show us the difference between "city japan" and "rural japan" (especially technology and behaviour-wise), but the constant screaming and second hand embarrassement is just too much. And besides getting stronger and using better techniques there are no character arcs (as of in S2). The boar + thunder kid just ruined the whole series for me t_t And the mountain peasant/animalistic superpower schtick is boring as hell after an episode or two. 6.5/10

Samurai Champloo - y2k graffiti/breakdance meets samurais. Boi, what an A-M-A-Z-I-N-G anime! The AV, OST, art style, all the fight scenes and character design... all of it is 10/10. Of course the found family trope can never be trumped, however the story itself was adventurous, not repetitive (except for them never having money lol), captivating, witty and emotional when it needed to be. Also the episodes tie into each other a lot, which makes the storytelling natural (+ its not just episodes put in order). The MC's are all 3D with weaknesses, believable behaviors and distinct manners + they have easy to remember names and styles. Watching the messy trio's friendship come to live is something I want to witness again for sure.

Konosuba! - A surprisingly bad and adorable parody of the isekai genre that I could only watch all the way through after the 3rd attempt. Most characters are completely helpless/stupid/naive but in an oddly charming way. The MC is ofc a pervert neet that is insufferable, but his oversexualized companions are cute, their friendship is cute, and their boobs are huge. Watch it while having dinner 6/10

Ouran highschool host club - light hearted and stupid and has some second hand embarrassement, but its a must watch! I wish the artstyle was different tho :/ 8.5/10

The Apothecary Diaries - Sherlock Holmes meets chinese historical romance fanfic. Beautiful, captivating and rewatchable. Very dreamy (but i have a feeling that theres going to be a lot of drama and sadness in the future? idk i havent started the light novel yet) 9/10

Midnight Occult Civil Servants - its so much more worth it than ppl think! Yes, the power of friendship is strong in this one, buuuut 1) its not overdone 2) the story is not sugarcoated and there are some interesting philosophical topics that we touch throughout the episodes 3) even though the MC is a naive and ridiculously hard working boy, he learns a lot from his mistakes and kinda grows up. His friends are lovely too! I just wish that their design was a bit more detailed, the animation got a bit more budget and that we could have gotten a bit more chapters... 8/10!

Mignon - a korean BL manwha adaptation. Each episode is around 5 mins so the story isnt too complicated. It has vampires (why dont we get more of them nowadays??) and sexy man-love. 6.5/10

Golden Boy - It is a golden comedy (and educational) anime and it's so humorous that I actually laughed watching it. At first it seems annoying/ridiculous but from the end of the first episode I understood the premise and the point of the anime. The boy doesnt learn much, but the women around him do. 7.5/10

Kamisama Kiss - I loved it at the beginning and then felt really let down by it, cuz 1) I learned about the end of the story and got pissed off (because ***SPOILER ALERT who the fuck thought that giving up your occult superpowers and long life is romantic? WHO?***) and 2) it got so rushed at the end. The art style is not my favorite ad some of the frames looked cheap, but I loved the comical use of expressions and some of the designs were really cool. 6/10 (and -100/10 because of the ending of the manga. Seriously. Fuck that.)

[princess-of-the-corner]

So this rant on a character, and I fully agree with the idea that the dude is meant to be the Saitama of Isekai Protags

Yogiri Takatou: The Most Overpowered Isekai Protagonist of All Time

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to introduce you to a character who may just be the most absolutely broken character in all of modern fiction. His name is Yogiri Takatou and he is the protagonist of a light novel called “The Other World Doesn’t Stand a Chance Against the Power of Instant Death” or just “Instant Death” for short.

So what is Instant Death? It’s more or less your typical Isekai. A bunch of Japanese kids get transported to a generic fantasy world and are given magic powers so they can go on adventures or some shit. But this is an Isekai with a twist. One of those kids is Yogiri and he already had a special power before he got sent to the other world. His power allows him to basically kill anything he wants just by thinking about it. And I mean literally anything.

He can kill people, animals, monsters, the undead, actual gods, beings that exist beyond time and space, inanimate objects, and metaphysical concepts like gravity. Yes you heard me correctly, this man can kill gravity itself. He can kill things that aren’t even alive or shouldn’t be able to die in the first place. He can kill beings that live in other universes, other dimensions, or in completely different planes of existence. Death is instant. All he has to do is think “die” and you’ll die immediately. Death is absolute. Anything that is killed by Yogiri can never be resurrected or restored, you are dead forever. Not even immortal beings or people with strong healing factors are safe.

And that’s not where the bullshit ends. He also has the ability to sense murderous intent in others and his power will automatically kill anyone who seeks to kill him, no matter who or where they are. Literally, if you even think about killing him, you will die. You can be on another planet, billions of light years away from him, and if you think “I’m going to kill Yogiri Takatou,” you will die instantly. You cannot ambush this man, you cannot sneak up on him, take him by surprise or hide from him. Oh, and fun fact, Yogiri is protected by Fate itself, meaning that he literally cannot lose ever because fate will always guarantee his victory. He’s a whole ass Suggsverse character.

And the crazy part about this is that these aren’t even abilities that he was granted when he got isekai’d. He’s had these abilities back on Earth. Because Yogiri isn’t even a fucking human, he’s the living embodiment of the concept of absolute death, the end of of all existence, the literal apocalypse in human form. He doesn’t simply kill things, he ends the very concept of things. All this shit that I’ve just listed out are his base form. He actually has seals that limit his true power and his true form is an omnipotent, omnipresent cosmic horror entity

He is a Keter-class SCP that’s pretending to be an Isekai protagonist.

I haven’t even decided if I even like Instant Death yet. The story isn’t particularly amazing in my opinion, but Yogiri is so ridiculous that I just had to talk about him. I think Instant Death is meant to be a parody/satire of the Isekai genre in the same way that One Punch Man is a parody of battle shonen, at least that’s what people say. Similar to how Saitama represents the concept of the overpowered shonen hero taken to its most logical extreme, Yogiri is this for Isekai protagonists: the unassuming bland Japanese schoolboy who just happens to have the most broken ability in the series

That is fucking hilarious actually.

[liquidstar]

Is konosuba funny and should I watch it?

I only watched 3 episodes so idrk. I think there were genuinely a lot of really funny jokes but I also think it fell kinda flat and was predictable at other points. Like, you could see the joke of the main guy using his steal ability to steal panties a mile away. And for a series known for being an expectation subversive absurdist parody, it's kinda disappointing how often it resorts to the most generic anime boob jokes and stuff.

That kinda stuff CAN be funny though, I thought The Vampire Dies In No Time has a lot of really funny and really dumb shit in the same vein (can still be hit or miss) this isn't a sex jokes=BAD thing, it's just the I've seen so many of these same jokes done already so... It doesn't hit.

The stuff that actually is funny in konosuba is when they actually subvert genre conventions for the gag. I kinda like the concept of all the characters sucking. Like isekai seinfeld, as many people have compared it too. I can very easily see it becoming better the more you watch and the more the character dynamics grow on you. But I never did get past episode 3 so I can't say

[anyablackwood]

WIP Aesthetic Tag

Thanks for the tag, @mysticstarlightduck! I'll be going with Traveling Bards!

Rules: "Make a moodboard for your WIP, a playlist (3+ songs/music will suffice but it can be as long as you want) and describe the Vibe of your WIP."

Playlist:

Soldier, Poet, King by The Oh Hellos

Strawberry Blond by Mitski

Fireflies (Cullen Vance cover) by Owl City

Passerine by The Oh Hellos

Dancer and the Moon by Blackmore's Night

Kingdom Dance from Tangled

Second Child, Restless Child by The Oh Hellos

Some of these are songs I think they'd play, some of them are just the general vibes of the story (or both)

Inspo/Vibe:

Pseudo-Medieval (early Renaissance?) era fantasy world

Initially meant to be a parody of otome (female-oriented dating sim) games/otome Isekai (reincarnation) webcomics

Rapidly devolved into a regular isekai comedy that only occasionally pokes fun at the genre

World-traveling comedic adventure with a trio of sisters and the boy they aggressively adopted along the way

A comedy that's totally a comedy and doesn't have a single bit of seriousness in it whatsoever, says the author who's never written a comedy and makes everything angsty even if she doesn't want to

Magic, music, and monsters, oh my!

Bucket list globe-trotting romp with sisters that incidentally collect an increasing amount of crimes along the way

MCs are fantasy nerds that intentionally aim to hit every standard Hero Adventure story beat and live out their nerdy dreams

Gently tagging: @pandoras-comment-box, @amaiguri, @creatrackers, and anyone else who's interested!

[crehador]

brother crab's summer 2024 first impressions: isekai shikkaku

idk if we needed another anime dazai when the best one already exists

talking about him of course

anyway. in all seriousness. i'd say isekai shikkaku is solidly Fine But Not Good for now, it does nothing really special with the parody isekai genre. in terms of like... harem of girls obsessed with isekai'd mc who is completely oblivious and concerned with other things <- that trope? isekai oji-san does it way better

so all this one really has going for it, in terms of uniqueness, is the i guess constant stream of (attempted) suicide jokes that come bundled with dazai as a character. but can you really sustain a series on just that

well eating poison off the floor like a whorish cat is something i suppose

for kamiyan i will be continuing. i feel like i haven't seen him in anything all year. but so far it's just... mid, if i'm being generous